Monday, February 26, 2018

SpaceShipCraft

Hello Everyone!

As many of you already probably know about, we have a game called SpaceShipCraft available on our main site.

But why haven't there been any posts about it?
I feel that it is now time to mention its existence as the extent that the project got to surpassed our expectations and now deserves a mention on the blog. We do not currently have a versioning system in place for the game either, which also contributed to me not posting any updates about it. However, these reasons are no longer strong enough to not give it a good mention. Here is an overview of the games mechanic, and some possible future features:

Game features:

Fully designable, paintable, and expandable ships. Our ship design system includes a wide array of spaceship parts, meant to have full customization through independent key binding.

Ship editor - Ship editing takes place on a 32 by 32 grid, with the only restriction being all parts must connect to the bridge, and the ship must have a bridge (bridge being the 'command center').

Online multiplayer - The main focus of this game is online multiplayer in which you face off in free for all with your ship against everyone else's. This is where your design starts to really matter, and design efficiency really starts to shine.

Physics engine - albeit inefficient in rendering, the game has some very 'lifelike' two dimensional physics, all thanks to my brothers efforts. This makes the game both difficult and really fun. The physics extends not only to maneuvering the ships but for bullets and collisions too, allowing for real-time collision and part destruction. This is the heart of what makes the game fun.

Currently I would like to consider this my brothers project. He was the lead developer on the physics of the game, while I assisted in menus and did most of the server side extension coding. He also helped with the game concept, as to what parts we wanted to be available to the player, how to balance game-play, and what we wanted for the future. I was in charge of all of the in game art, from parts to the star parallax to the (rather basic) menu layout.

We did work on a development version that introduced multi-room online gaming, but the future development has been put on hold since our lives have become more busy.

I hope we will someday be able to return to development of this promising game, but for now, I would like to leave at least a shout-out to its existence. Like always, feel free to comment with any suggestions you have.